I made myself sit with that.

I have found it’s important to look directly at the worst things, because the mind wants to soften them into something survivable and the softening is a kind of lie.

So: while I bled and prayed and did not know if my baby would live, the two people who should have been on the next flight were instead choosing which paragraph would let them keep him if he did.

There was no version of that I could round down into a misunderstanding.